An ad in Facebook popped up promoting external SSD drives of up to 30 Tb capacity - buy one, get one free (the 30Tb goes for $99.99).
I suspect a scam - someone is using Toshiba logos and similar URL’s without their knowledge. Can anyone confirm?
Ultra High Speed Portable SSD-BUY 1 GET 1 FREE (toshibaus.com)
Absolutely, positively, beyond the smallest shadow of a doubt a scam.
If you ever find yourself asking “Is this a scam?” odds are it’s a scam.
The whois data for toshibaus.com looks completely different from that for toshiba.com, so I don’t think the former is associated with Toshiba. Also a company like Toshiba could afford an English-speaking proofreader, so they wouldn’t have so many grammatical errors on their website.
I find it kinda funny that the scam site certificate is issued by Cloudflare, while the real Toshiba site certificate is issued by GoDaddy. GoDaddy doesn’t exactly scream organizational competence (I mean, I use them, but I don’t run a transnational conglomerate).
Someone at Cloudflare dropped the ball, IMO, though I don’t know what kind of due diligence they’re supposed to do when it comes to issuing certificates.
If you want a real 30 TB SSD you can pick one up for $6600, on sale buy one, get one at full price.
I was gonna say, there is no way in hell a 30TB drive, SSD or not, is $100, marked down from $300. That’s the price of a 4TB conventional external hard drive. I can’t even find a Toshiba SSD external, but that’s about the price point of 2TB external SSD drives, and on the low side of that. No way is one 30TB SSD drive $100, much less two drives for that price.
My guess is that the device will report to the operating system the higher capacity, but if you attempt to write more data than space is actually available for, it’ll just overwrite some of the older data. I suspect a lot of people don’t normally use most of the space, and even if they do, they probably won’t notice the issue until far too late, and they might just think their cheap hard drive crashed.
I’ve been shopping around for 2 or 3 TB worth of external flash devices (split across several devices, each to contain a specific data type) and have been mulling over tossing one of these into the mixture of thumbdrives
https://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-2TB-Extreme-Portable-SDSSDE61-2T00-G25/dp/B08GTYFC37
Back in the day you could get a green band Organizational Verified (OV) or an Extended Validation (EV) cert where you had to prove who you are. Virtually all domains today are validated simply by a DNS record or an http accessible file on the domain in question to prove you control it. There is no validation that the domain owner is who they claim to be.
Lame (but thanks for the info). That system (special file on the domain) is what I used for the Let’s Encrypt cert on my personal site, but one would hope that larger orgs would get some kind of extended validation. Seems pretty meaningless otherwise, except to enable an encrypted connection.
As mentioned above, you suspect correctly. There likely are several ads floating around Facebook featuring similar images like there have been with laptops featuring the Best Buy price tag logo. So many different accounts posting the same exact two “Best Buy” images, the only difference being the price – if that.
Yeah, this scam is absurdly common online and has pervaded both online retailers and physical bricks and mortar stores.
The scam works in part because it’s so very common. Search amazon for 2tb USB drive and (depending on the prevailing wind) you may get page after page of nothing but scams - so less tech-savvy people doing that search never get to see the fake, cheap flash storage juxtaposed against the expensive genuine storage of same capacity.
The other factor is that the devices are typically spoofed to report the advertised capacity. People don’t realise that when you plug external storage into your computer, the host machine is never directly accessing/measuring the capacity. The conversation between host and storage is mediated by a microcontroller on the external device, which is the part that tells the host how much capacity it has, so it’s trivial to get it to simply lie to the host machine.
I’ve had so many people argue that theirs is genuine because they checked the properties.
In use, the devices may appear to be storing the right amount of data simply because the file allocation table is at the bottom of the actual genuine storage area. The file contents may be written to the void in an address that doesn’t physically exist. Again, this tricks people because they say ‘but I copied 2tb of files to it!’. Yeah, now try getting them back.
That seems to be a good choice. Its read/write speeds are pretty sustainable. The Extreme v2 is even better, and doesn’t suffer from thermal throttling during long transfers.
I don’t think you can even get a 30TB spinning rust (sorry, I mean “traditional magnetic platter”) drive for the price they are advertising, so it’s definitely a scam.
Yep! "If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck … " LOL
I recently fell for one of those while looking to expand my desktop’s storage capacity. Fortunately, I noticed the red flags in time to successfully cancel the order and get a genuine name brand instead.
I think 26 TB is still the largest hard drive.
https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/hardware/western-digital-announces-first-26tb-server-hard-drive
If you want cheap but real flash, two good brand names (but which aren’t really “household words”) are Silicon Power and Teamgroup.
I can’t find my source any more, but I read that’s exactly what they do. The worst part is that it will pass many drive tests, because mosts tests write data, then only check the last few sectors written to make sure they read back OK. So the only reasonable way one article found to prove their capacity is to open them up and look at the SSD chips used.